At one point we came upon a borne kilomérique that said Argentan 12 kilometers. Everybody started walking faster. Twelve kilometers, people were saying, that’s not far. Papa said, I don’t know if I can make it. Maman told him to sit down on the ground and rest a while. She told me to take Papa’s suitcase, and for Sarah to take his backpack. After a while, we started walking again. But we stopped often so that Papa could rest. He had difficulty breathing. Lots of people were passing us. Finally we arrived in Argentan.
There were German soldiers everywhere who were directing people towards Place de la République. They were very pleasant with us. They didn’t push us around, didn’t hit us. Some of them even spoke French. Especially the officers.
The big square was full of people. Hundreds and hundreds of them. Some were standing, others were sitting on the ground or on their suitcases. A German officer in a black leather jacket was standing on a platform speaking French with a bullhorn. I was surprised that a German spoke French so well, without an accent. Even my father who knew six languages had an accent in French.
The officer on the platform was telling us not to be afraid. That the soldiers were going to take care of us. Give us food, and find us a place to sleep.
In fact, German soldiers were already circulating in the crowd of refugees distributing bread and water. They even gave milk to the mothers with babies. We got a loaf of bread and some fruit.
Everything was so well organized. The Germans knew in advance that all these people were arriving, and they had prepared to receive them not like enemies, but like friends.
The officer on the platform then said that families with several children will be lodged first. And he told these families to step forward. So, my parents, sisters and I moved to the front. Two soldiers motioned for us to follow them.
As we walked with these two soldiers in the streets of the city, the Argentan people were watching us from their windows. They must have been wondering, who are these idiots from Paris who are so afraid of the Germans. When the Germans arrived in Argentan, a few days earlier, they were nice and
pleasant with the inhabitants. They didn’t demolish anything, didn’t burn anything, didn’t steal anything. They just took from the markets only the food they needed. And they immediately established order in the city, which was necessary since the people of Argentan became anxious and restless when they learned that German trucks were approaching. So the Germans had to put the people at ease. Especially because they panned to occupy Argentan for a long time. The only strict order which was enforced was that no one was allowed in the streets after six o’clock in the evening.
As we walked, we didn’t look back at the people who were staring at us. We were ashamed to be refugees. We felt like foreigners.
Me, I was concentrating on the uniforms of the soldiers and on their rifles. I would have loved to have had tin soldiers just like them.
While we were walking with the two soldiers, Papa started talking to them in German. I don’t know what he was saying, but after that the two soldiers were very nice to us. They installed us in a two-story house which was empty, except for some furniture. Then one of them went to get food for us. The one who stayed continued the conversation with my father. I was so impressed with my father. Then the soldiers left, and we settled in. For the first time I had my own room, and my sisters too. We learned later that this house had been a youth hostel, but when the war started it was closed and abandoned.
During our entire stay in Argentan, almost an entire year, these two German soldiers often visited with my father. They even brought other German soldiers along with them. They would bring their uniforms that needed fixing to my mother. A torn sleeve, a missing button to be sewn back on.
Maman became the couturière of these soldiers. She even washed and pressed their shirts. They were all so nice to us.
Meanwhile, once in a while, with a special pass from the kommendantur, Papa would take the train to Paris to buy things for the Germans. French perfume. Silk stockings. Jewelry. Chocolate. All kinds of things like that which were still available in France, but no longer in Germany since the beginning of the war. So we were comfortable in Argentan. We had a good life. A whole house for ourselves, extra money, extra food. The soldiers who became friendly with my father would always bring us food.
One of the Germans who came regularly to our house was a Feldwebel. A sergeant. His name was Willie Forst.
I’ve never forgotten that name, because my father told me that there was a famous German actor of that period who was also called Willie Forst. I don’t know how my father knew that, bu tmy father knew many things.
A small group of Germans soldiers came regularly to our house in the evening to drink beer and have discussions with my father.
When they arrived, they would give me some money to go buy des canettes de bière, and the next day when I returned the empty bottles I would get one sou for each one.
In the evening when the Germans came to our house, my father would sit with them in one of the large rooms in the house. Sometimes he would let me stay in the room after I brought the beer. I would sit quietly on the floor in a corner of the room and listen to them talk even though I didn’t understand what they were saying. After a while I would catch a few words which they often repeated. Like the word krieg. The words schwer, Frau, Kinder, Arbeit. And other words like that. I would ask Papa what these words meant, and also what they were discussing. He would tell me that they were talking about their families, about what they did before the war, things like that. But especially, my Father said, We discuss politics.
I already told in the list of scenes how before leaving all these Germans would raise their fist and sing the International. No need to repeat that many Communists were hiding in the German army.
We stayed a year in Argentan. This was the least unhappy period of my childhood. In the fall of 1940, I was admitted to the Lycée d’Argentan where many sons of refugees went. All of different ages. But we got along together. Except that the boys from Argentan didn’t like us. When we were coming out of school they would start fights with les parigots, as they called us. We would throw stones at each other or chestnuts, and hit each other with our school satchels. Me too, I would get into these fights. In Argentan, I started gaining weight and getting stronger because we ate well, and I was becoming less shy.
I got my Certificat d’étude from the Argentan lycée with mention très bien. My mother and father were proud of me.
We should have stayed in Argentan. My father was doing well with the black market. My sisters and I liked the schools we were attending. In Argentan nobody cared where you came from since most of the people were refugees.
Yes, we should have stayed in Argentan, but a decree from the Vichy government announced that all the refugees had to return to their homes. So eventually we went back to Montrouge, even though Papa had arranged with the Germans for us to stay longer than other Parisians.
For me, it was as if a long vacation was ending. I hated to leave.
I wonder what would have happened if we’d stayed in Argentan. Most likely we would have been denounced as collaborators. Already the people in our neighborhood were saying bad things about us because German soldiers often came to our house.
They said it even more the day Willie Forst brought us a truck load of coal. It was the beginning of winter, and it was getting cold. The truck stopped in front of our house and unloaded the coal on the sidewalk.
After the truck left, Papa and me, and even Sarah and Jacqueline worked hard to bring the coal into the cellar of the house in buckets, while the neighbors were looking at us from their windows, and probably saying, those dirty collaborators.
I am sure that if we had stayed in Argentan, at the Liberation, people would have shaved our heads.
The irony is that my parents and sisters would have been shot in Argentan by a French firing squad as collaborators, and not as Jews in a German concentration camp.
And I would
probably have been shot too. But since I am here, still alive, telling you all the things that happened during my childhood, no need to speculate.
Soon after we got back to Montrouge, my mother had to sew the yellow star on all our clothes.
Then my parents and sisters were deported to Auschwitz, and I was deported, in a manner of speaking, to the farm in Southern France where ...
Federman, maybe you should tell us what happened when you and your family were ordered to return to Montrouge. How it was living during the occupation.
Oh, it was such a sad period. Much of it has been blocked in my mind. But I’ll try.
When we left the house in Argentan with our suitcases on the way to the train station, as we walked away I looked back at the house, and sadness came over me. I was twelve now, and full of apprehension about what was ahead for me.
On the train to Paris we all sat quietly. Barely talking to each other. It was as though we felt we were going towards a disaster.
The apartment in Montrouge seemed smaller than before. Everything was dusty. We all helped clean up, even my father.
The neighborhood was also different, drab and somber. There were no street lights at night.
German soldiers were everywhere. They were not as nice with people as the soldiers who greeted us in Argentan. When they went into a store or a café or anywhere and people were in their way they would push them aside. They would often stop people in the streets to check their identity cards. Trucks full of soldiers were rushing all over the city.
Once in a while, a group of soldiers would walk in step down our street, their rifles on their shoulders, their heavy boots clanking on the pavement, and sing military songs. People would watch them from behind their closed curtains.
There was a curfew. Nobody was allowed in the street in the evening. And when people turned on the lights in their apartments, they had to cover the windows with blankets. Very often there were alerts. The sirens would blare, and everybody would rush down to the cellars.
Though Paris had been declared an Open City and would not be bombed, British planes would bomb the factories in the
suburbs and the trains and military convoys approaching the city. So during the alerts the people would crowd into small cellars with flashlights or candles. My mother would keep us close to her, but my father often refused to go down to the cellar.
All the food was rationed. Once a week mother would go to the mairie to get our food stamps. Children were divided into three categories depending on their age, J1, J2, J3. My older sister Sarah was a J3. Jacqueline and I were J2s. That meant that mother was given a few more food stamps for the children. Many people who had money would buy extra food on the black market.
Leon and Marie, who returned to Montrouge before we did, bought a lot of food on the black market. Once in a while aunt Marie would come up to our place and give my mother some extra food, a few eggs, a piece of meat, some sugar, chocolate, pour les enfants, she would say. But even with that extra food I was hungry all the time.
Soon after we returned, I started school again. But even school was different. The games we played were not as much fun. We often went home directly after school rather than play in the street. Besides carrying my school bag, I also had to carry a gas mask. Everybody had to carry a gas mask everywhere they went. Sometimes in our apartment my sisters and I would put on our gas masks just for the fun of it, but mother would immediately tell us to put them back into the canister. That’s what that metallic case was called.
My sister Sarah started working in a factory. I think it was a factory where they made lampshades. My father also got a job drawing models for a clothing manufacturer. He stayed home more than before. He did the drawings on the dining room table. Only once in a while would he go out to play cards at
the Metropole Café, but he would come home early, before the curfew.
One day he was arrested for having participated in some political gathering. We thought we would never see him again. I remember my mother frantically rushing to the police station to find out what had happened. By that time a lot of men, even married men, were being sent to Germany to work in factories. But he stayed in jail only one day. He was sent home because he had tuberculosis. This was the time when all the Jews had to declare themselves. As I said earlier, because we lived in a suburb where there were only a few Jews, my father decided that we should not declare ourselves. But the anti-Semite in our building denounced us, and my parents had to go to the préfecture to declare their identities and their possessions as Jews. And so did Leon and Marie.
Soon after that my mother had to sew the yellow star on all our clothes. I could still go to school, but no longer to swimming pools, museums, libraries, cinemas, and other public places.
It was now the beginning of 1942, according to the newspapers and the radio, the Germans were winning the war. But the people who had a radio would listen quietly to the Free French Radio from London, and even though the emissions were all garbled they would hear that it was the British and the Americans, who were now also in the war, who were winning. It gave people a little hope, even though our daily life was getting more and more difficult and sad.
By now Jewish children were no longer allowed to go to school. So I stayed home. I didn’t feel like playing with my tin soldiers. I was too old for that. Nor with my stamp collection. I had reread all my Jules Verne. I would stand at the open window and watch the birds fly, or else count how many people in the street walked past our house, or how many cars
would go by. Sometimes Maman would come and stand next to me and say, Soon the war will be finished, you’ll see, the Americans are going to win the war for us, and you’ll be able to go to a lycée, and then she would put her arm around me and squeeze me, but I would pull away from her.
Things were bad now. Jews were not allowed to take the metro. So we walked wherever we had to go. But mostly we stayed home. Since we didn’t own a radio we could not listen to the news. Five of us lived in the same space, but separately from one another. Leon and Marie had a radio, and once in a while my mother would listen to the news with them, especially the news that came from London, and she would tell my father what she had heard. My father still didn’t get along with Leon.
By early Spring rumors were circulating that Jewish men were being arrested and sent to labor camps in Germany. Only men.
And then July came. And on the 16th of that month, my childhood ended. After that ...
Federman, very interesting what you just told. Perhaps you should tell more.
I don’t think I can, or even want to. It was such a depressing period. And what else is there to say. Everybody lived in fear and sadness.
Alright then, tell us, as you promised in your list, what happened with your cousin Salomon.
I don’t know. It’s a bit filthy. But since I promised, I suppose should do it.
Sometimes when I was doing my homework and I didn’t understand something, especially problems of algebra or geometry, I would ask my cousin Salomon for help.
Salomon was four years older, and he had already studied all that. Besides, everybody in the family said that he was very smart, and gifted in the sciences, and that one day he would certainly become a doctor or a pharmacist. After the war Salomon became a tailor just like his father.
I think Salomon would have preferred to become a gangster. He looked like one of those Chicago gangsters in Hollywood movies. When he was older, and thought himself an adult, he always dressed like a gangster. Double-breasted suit that his father made for him. Salomon always got anything he wanted. So if he wanted a doublebreasted suit with stripes, he got it immediately. I think Leon liked when my aunts and uncles complimented him for the new suit he’d made for his son. Salomon was a living model for Leon.
With his gangster suit, Salomon would wear a felt hat with a wide brim pulled down over his eyes when he went out to Montparnasse to meet his friends, who dressed exactly like him. Many of Salomon’s buddies had suits
made by Leon. In a way, Salomon was like publicity for his father’s work. He was good-looking. All the aunts kept telling him how handsome he was. His hair was black and curly. He would slick it back into a duck tail, pulled tight on the sides. He used a lot of brilliantine so his hair would shine and stay in place. Salomon was always so sure of himself. The way he dressed, the way he acted, the way he spoke let people know he was the son of rich parents.
I was so envious of Salomon. Especially of the way he combed his curly hair.
Mine was straight, with a part on the side, and always a bit messy. I didn’t take care of my hair. In My Body in Nine Parts I tell that it was my mother who took care of my hair. She combed it, washed it, made the part on the side, took the lice out of it. She did everything one normally does to hair. After my mother was taken away I had to take care of my own hair. So I became more conscious of how it looked.
After the war, when I returned to Montrouge, I was combing my hair like Salomon, like Marco rather, I should say, since that was the non-Jewish name he gave himself during the war.
Once in a while, after the war, before I left for America, Salomon a.k.a Marco would let me come with him to the Montparnasse cafés where he hung out with his friends. They always called me Marcotin, as though I was a diminutive of Marco, but I liked the name.
Let’s get back to what happened one day when I went to ask Salomon to help me with my homework.
I go down to his apartment. The door was not locked. I make sure to put my feet on the little patins when I go in. Salomon is not in the living room. I look for him in the other rooms, and I find him with his pants at his feet, masturbating in front of the armoire mirror in his parents’ bedroom. He didn’t get mad when he saw me. He didn’t even blush. He turned towards me still holding his erection in his hand and asked, Don’t you ever do that?
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